


The Penny Drops

by CopperBeech



Category: Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
Genre: F/M, Gen, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2020-08-14 14:24:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20193730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperBeech/pseuds/CopperBeech
Summary: We don't know what was going on behind Penny's eyes in her last moments.





	The Penny Drops

**Author's Note:**

> Written some years back for a Dr. Horrible fanfic challenge which sadly closed before I got a crack at it. So here we go.

She’d known he was a bastard from the get-go, of course. Her father had taught her, early and often, what a bastard was and how one behaved even when he wasn’t being bastardly. And he’d taught her, equally unintentionally, how to keep on a bastard’s good side, so that even with the inevitable slip-ups, you could get at least some of what you wanted. You might get cuffed and smacked, but if you played them right, they wouldn’t use their fists, and you might get the doll for Christmas or permission to go on the school trip. Her hapless younger brother had never learned how to do it, when to be apologetic and mousy, when to be winsome and appealing; maybe it was something that only a girl could do. 

Penny still kept his photo by her bed – part reminder, part penance. She’d been numb from the collapse of her fourth bad relationship, another go-round with another unpleasable Dad stand-in, when she’d been called to identify the body. Charming and clownish but lost, absent, unreachable even in a room full of people, Buddy –they’d always been just Sis and Buddy to one another – had drifted into the greys and recesses of the city as soon as he was able to leave home. She could never find him, but he could always find her when he needed a few dollars for rent in some dump or, she suspected, for drugs. Standing in front of the closed-circuit monitor in the hospital morgue, she’d said yes, that is my brother Hollis Carson. There was oxycontin in his system but he’d died of hypothermia. The next day she had gone to volunteer at the shelter.

So it seemed like sweet justice when, moments after she’d sized him up, Captain Hammer had dropped the hint that the mayor might, just might consider her petition to donate the Waterfront Building as shelter space, if the city’s favorite hero spoke up for it. She’d moused and smiled and admired as her father had taught her so well.

Why was she surprised that he was standing there at the podium telling the world that she wasn’t “his usual”? That he was charming the socks off a room full of people by mortifying her? What had changed? She found that she had. This time she was leaving, she’d be gone by the time he came down off his cloud of self-admiration. She was almost to the door when the statue stepped down off the pedestal, sporting goggles and a fearful contraption, like the last act of Don Giovanni performed by space aliens, shock, panic, almost as a footnote the big beefy Daddy figure poised at the rostrum, arms raised almost as Dad had raised them to shake her like a kitten when she was home five minutes late…

She wanted… she wanted what? To be someplace safe, comforting. To be in the laundry, where the clean hot smells and the genially fake perfumes of detergent spoke of safety and caretaking and renewal. What if she’d left there yesterday with Billy and not with the big lout posturing as if waiting for a camera and not for the, dear God what was that thing the spaceman was firing, no not a spaceman, Dr. Horrible, she could even hear him pausing to spell it for the press, were there any of them who weren’t in love with themselves? 

She peered between the chairs, scrabbling on her knees toward the exits in back. The Horrible man was firing into the air, throwing down challenges to his frozen nemesis. What did any of them want except to be told they were the greatest and the mightiest? In no time she would be in the laundry again and she would watch the clothes dancing in the bubbles and bleach, and Billy would come in and she would startle him with a hug and then – then she would cry and he would hold her, wouldn’t he?

She crept toward the doors. They wouldn’t see her. They were intent on each other. One yard, another yard…

Impact, a fist smacking flesh, a clatter. Let them fight it out. She needed someone like her brother, someone gentle, someone who had nothing to prove. Two yards more, then…

Smack. Don’t hit me again, Daddy. She was going to be sick. She was…

Swimming black, fading in and out. Billy. She was imagining this. No, it was Billy. Are you all right? Her own voice, like something in a dream, something heard at the edge of sleep… the goggles. Dr. Horrible’s goggles. On Billy.

What did any of them want?

The light blinking in and out.

He was like all the rest of them. Desolation sucked her down. She had one chance to strike back. As she’d never dared to do.

“Captain Hammer will save us,” she said. It hurt to force out the words but it was worth the effort, to see his eyes go dead seconds before she could not see them at all, could see nothing except the black.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hello on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


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